Cost of housing among area's top woes: Survey cites it as major reason 2 of 5 residents consider leaving. You're not the only one dreaming of ditching the Bay Area for a Midwestern college town or a coastal city in the Southeast. Two out of five residents of the nine-county region have given serious thought to moving away -- mostly because of high housing costs, according to a survey released today by a business and public policy group. The don't worry, be happy crowd will dismiss this too, the same way they've dismissed the rampantly obvious housing bubble that has inflated in the Bay Area in recent years. But the situation is only getting worse, not better. The disconnect between what people pay for homes

and what they can rent them for has never been greater. Buyers are utterly depending on continued housing price inflation; given that many if not most recent "purchases" -- a word that you can use only in a most distantly accurate sense in this context -- have been with no-interest or no-down-payment loans. It won't take a collapse in prices (and I don't believe we'll see that) to cause serious economic harm in the currently hottest housing markets around the nation. That's because the leverage is so great, because people have so little equity in their homes, especially the recent "buyers" who would be under water with the slightest change in market conditions. With stocks, people weren't allowed to borrow this way, and it did take a general collapse of NASDAQ technology-stock prices to cause the harm we'll be years in making right. Several hundred thousand people in northern California alone might be under water on their homes if there's even a mild downturn, because they're so leveraged now. This could get ugly. So it's no wonder that rational folks are considering cashing out, if they own a home with serious equity, or moving to where they can afford to buy one if they make normal wages. People run in herds on economic matters. Will they run straight for Des Moines? It's harder than buying overpriced stocks or houses. But the advantage other parts of the U.S. are building in cost of living is getting too pronounced to ignore. I hope, like most people, for a soft landing that would give the region some breathing room. I suspect that we may have gone too far to achieve one. On this I hope I'm very, very wrong.